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  Honest Gothic lasses with broad hips for bearing, and no knowledge of degenerate tricks; these had been good enow for Alaric’s father Euric-and aurochs horns to drink from. No question, the race was declining. The younger generation would never carry it to century’s end, but fourteen years off.

  Well… business.

  “I want them!” he repeated, and glared at the merchants. “And you objects are going to help me take them. Do not think elsewise!”

  “Impossible, my lord!” Desiderius Crispus cried. “I do not deal with these men, nor does the Syrian. I keep myself informed. Did they barter their loot in Burdigala at all, I would know of it.”

  “True, it’s true, my good lord!” The confirmation burst eagerly from Philip. “Their buyer is in Nantes, in the Roman kingdom.”

  “Nantes,” the count growled. “And the name of their buyer?”

  “I do not know, my lord. By Saint Martin, it’s the truth!”

  Though Guntram eyed them narrowly, he did not hector them the further. He’d sharper pins than that to jab these two with.

  He said sharply, “Your oath in a saint’s name settles it. It must be true. The part about Nantes is right, in any event, and it’s fortunate for you that I happen to know. I’ve had a spy there of late; the same that uncovered your own shifty dealings, so y’see he knows his word. He traced the man through a customs official he found to be corrupt. The Dane and his partner deal with one Balsus Ammian. Know you aught of him?”

  “My lord Count, I do.” Desiderius said, and Guntram saw his surprise was real enow. “But it would seem… not so much as I did think.” He watched the count make an impatient gesture; Guntram had not fetched in Desiderius to flatter his choice of spies. “Aye. Balsus Ammian dwells by the waterfront and makes great affectation of being one step from poverty, but in truth he’s no less rich than-”

  The merchant stopped suddenly.

  “Than you are?” Guntram suggested. “Aye, that tallies with my man’s description. We talked until late last night.”

  The merchants’ mutual thought was easy to guess: I must learn who this spy of Guntram’s is. Which, of course, was why he was not present at this meeting they now knew Guntram had planned, and planned well.

  “An I find ferrets of yours within sniffing distance of his name,” the count said genially, “I’ll see your bones picked bare and rattling in the wind. Understood?”

  Under those innocently staring blue eyes, they did assurance on him that they understood.

  “So. Let’s get on, then. These piratical swine have shown that they too keep themselves informed. I mean to tempt ’em with a cargo they can scarce resist. Wine, for the most part, but with a treasure of lighter goods, and none of the dangers of fakery; the lading will be true. It will sail from Narbo, and around Hispania hither. Word will be let fall. The Dane and the Gael, if I judge them aright, will not waylay the ship off the Hispanic coast. They will choose to take it within comfortable distance of their market-and Athanagild will be waiting.”

  Guntram paused but long enough to glance at Athanagild; the commander nodded with enthusiasm.

  “And do you, sirs, know the best part of all?” Guntram went amiably on. “It is you who will public-spiritedly provide the bait, and at your own cost.”

  The merchants broke into a babble of protest. Proculus silenced them by gazing dreamily at the ceiling and murmuring, “Treason. The knives. The clamps. The hot lead.”

  Count Guntram nodded approval. This Proculus fellow might be snobbish and finicky, but once he got into the spirit of things the man was downright useful.

  “But my lord,” Desiderius bleated, “they may succeed after all!”

  “In which case you will have to take your losses, now won’t you? But aye, it’s a thought. I should like them to have a nasty surprise awaiting then in Nantes, in the event they do. It requires thought. But you have more to tell me yet. You may not traffic with Wulfhere and Cormac, but you are to betray to the full measure of your grimy knowledge the pirates you do buy from. Either they are taken and executed within the year-hooves of the Devil, within the season!-or you, dear sirs, suffer in their places. Well, sirs, I am waiting.”

  They did not force the noble count to wait overlong.

  CHAPTER ONE: Trap for A Pirate

  At the mouth of a reedy creek perched a raven with whetted beak and talons flexing. Dark was the predator, with sharp eyes for that which would feed her. Yet this raven was no bird, but a ship. And unlike her namesake, Raven was no scavenger of corpses, unless it were the great sprawling corpse of Rome’s empire in the west. She was a fighting bird.

  Two men stood in her bow in the morning light. Athanagild had described them without error, save in one point only. Yet still he had not conveyed their presence; to accomplish that would require a bard aflight on the inspiration of his demon.

  Wulfhere was immense, and no less; a man huge of height and thew, with fire-blue eyes under thickets of brow and a beard like a conflagration. Though he was restless with waiting, he moved not save to fondle the great ax he held across the front of his body and, once in a while, to sigh. At such times his scale byrnie expanded as if it were hard put to contain him. That was but illusion, though a remarkable one. On the Danish giant gleamed heavy golden buckles, studs, and armlets. His war-gear was adequate and more. In his belt gleamed the whalebone hilt of the broad-bladed dagger sheathed there, and a smaller ax was tucked through that same broad thick belt at his other hip. Against his knee leaned a shield like a scarred moon of battle.

  Athanagild’s one mistake had been in saying that the Skull-splitter overtowered him by a foot. It was half a foot only, though the high bull’s horns adorning the Dane’s helmet made it seem the more; Wulfhere affected the style of his ancestors. But then Athanagild’s one sight of Wulfhere Hausakliufr had been from a distance. The which was confirmed by the fact that Athanagild Beric’s son was yet alive. Wulfhere was only five inches over six feet…

  The man at his side was equally still, and seemed more at his ease in that moveless waiting. Leanly muscular in his shirt of black link-mail, Cormac mac Art of Eirrin wore no ornaments on his darkish skin. Strange this was, in one of a race whose men loved to adorn themselves, and never more splendidly then when they went forth to fight. This Gaelic Celt, though, had ceased long since to care for show. He was all stark professionalism as he scanned the nearby sea, casting an occasional searching glance into the reeds behind him. Had they moved contrary to the light sea breeze, he’d have issued a warning. For copper-beaked Raven lay in ambush here as in the jaws of a bear-hopefully a sleeping one.

  Cormac, Wulfhere, and their crew of Danes lurked in no less than the home waters of the Visigothic kingdom’s Garonne fleet. In truth, from where he stood at Raven’s bow, Cormac mac Art might have hurled a stone into the River Garonne’s estuary. Moreover, just the other side of that great estuary nestled Saxon settlements, and Saxon pirate ships along with some few thousand Saxon fighting men under a dozen independent chieftains-and every one was willing to be known as friend to Wulfhere’s greatest enemy, Hengist the Jute, King of Kent over in Britain.

  Four nights agone they had lowered Raven’s sail, unstepped her mast and rowed softly in with muffled oars. Since then they had eaten cold food only, spoken almost never, and then not above whispers. They had endured the mosquitoes and midges. As Cormac seemed scarcely to notice them, someone had murmured low that any gnat biting the sombre Gael knew it would die horribly.

  Waiting strained them sore, and chafed men of action. They endured. They exercised as best they could by arm-wrestling on the oar benches, and straining betwixt them with braced feet and backs.

  Rather nearby, other men than they were weary of waiting.

  On the estuary’s northern side, two galleys of the Visigothic royal fleet lay tucked behind a woody point of land. Athanagild Beric’s son, treading the deck of one ship, tugged his heavy moustache and frowned at his marines, who were eating their supplies at a de
plorable rate. Had he known the men he’d been ordered to capture had been almost within shouting distance for days, unseen and undreamed of, Fleet Commander Athanagild might have suffered a seizure.

  The while, beating up the coast from Bayonne in the merchant tub Thetis, came one Gervase, a plain sea captain. He squinted brown eyes northward, and then at the coast; Gervase was both fearful of Saxon war-boats and hoping for a Gothic galley on patrol.

  My luck, he thought morosely, to meet the Saxon pirates so near safe harbouring!

  An odd sort of voyage, too; the whole distance around Spain, and having to pay toll to the Vandals on the way. Curious. He spat to landward, with the wind. It wasn’t long since those towheaded heretical bastards would have taken the whole cargo, and slaughtered the crew for being Orthodox. A lot of them still would, and did. But Gaiseric was the man who had made their seapower, and he was a decade in hell.

  The Vandals were not the terror of all the Mediterranean any longer, but only the western half… and learning that one did not kill a cow for its milk. Still, they were unchancy, and it had been good to see the Pillars of Hercules fade into distance.

  It was strange, though, the way the backers had insisted on this route. They had brassed up so readily, too, with the Vandal’s toll. Not like them at all. From Narbo to Toulouse by road, and then down the river to Burdigala by barge, that was the proper route! Simpler and the Devil of a lot safer.

  Aye, but the royal court was at Toulouse. The Gothic king might have decided to buy the lot-at his price. Likely enough the backers had decided the Vandals were a better risk. In any case the danger money was coming to Gervase for it.

  Had he known that his backers and the Count of Burdigala had of a purpose set him out as bait for pirates, he might well have dropped in a fit at the same time as Athanagild. Both men were thus protected by lack of knowledge.

  At the creek-mouth, a fox barked twice.

  Sudden fierce eagerness filled Wulfhere’s Danes; not often did foxes bark from treetops. One of their own, called Halfdan Half-a-man for his short stature, swung nimbly down from branch to branch to soggy earth and made for the ship. An oar swept out over Raven’s strakes. The blade grounded on the creek-bank and Halfdan walked up it, a stocky personification of delight. He took shield and ax without having to think on it the while he moved forward to give word to his chieftain.

  His grin told the news ere his tongue could form it. “It’s the one! Or if not, there be two corbitos for Burdigala under brown canvas with a pale three-sided patch!”

  “How does she ride?”

  “Heavy! By Aegir the bountiful, there’s wine in her hold, as ye were assured! And outrun Raven such a’ round-bellied seagoing walnut could not, even were she riding light!” Halfdan smacked his lips. “We will drink tonight.”

  “Ahh,” Wulfhere gusted, in a bliss of anticipation. “Push out, then, ye thirsty sons of Dane-mark! Reward is ours!”

  Cormac said naught, and his grin was a bare skinning of teeth as he drew his sword. Dark and smooth-shaven was his face, of a sinister cast not amended by the scars upon it, or the cold narrow eyes grey as his weapon-steel. His visage was fitly framed in the cheek-pieces of his helmet, a hard leather casque strengthened with plaques of black iron. Its flowing horsehair crest was the nearest thing to ornament he had on him, and even that to a purpose; was a lasting taunt to Hengist’s Jutes, for the White Horse was the badge of their royal house, and they fought under a standard of white horsetails.

  Held vertically, oars thrust down into the creek-bed, poling Raven forward.

  As she slid lithely out to where she had more waterroom, the poling men seated themselves and ran their oars out horizontally. Their two-score benchmates did the same. The blades dipped raggedly, cut into water, and fifty strong men pulled back against its resistance.

  Raven sprang forth on a bright sea glittering with scales of hot gold.

  Knud the Swift, in the stern, called staves for his comrades to row by, and they rowed hard. Water peeled back white from Raven’s copper-sheathed prow. It hissed by the strakes. Oars lifted shining, swept back, dipped, and men drove them forward again, revelling in the free use of muscles too long cramped. Work? Naught of the kind! A touch of healthy exercise to get the kinks out before they bathed their weapons!

  “Brightly flash the oar-blades,

  Washing in the whale’s bath,

  Dipping in the salty

  Ale of Aegir’s daughters.

  Better is the brew there,

  Casked in yonder cargo,

  Where the wine of Eastland

  Waits for Wulfhere’s killers.

  “Ye that row to steerboard,

  Raise your oars and rest them,

  While the wights a-portside

  Turn us to the grappling.

  See, the southron sailors,

  White with terror-madness,

  Hunch like hunted conies

  With the stoats among them.”

  In truth, it was not such a large brag. The crew of Thetis was more than two to one outnumbered, and every man able plainly to see it. Nor might they have stood against the wild slayers out of the north, even at level odds. As for an attempt at flight… Raven was making three ship’s lengths to the fat corbito’s one. It was unfair, so close to home-and mad and raving mad the pirates must be, to be trying it! Demons from the reddest pits of hell they seemed, a-glimmer with metal scales and bosses and horned like Satan, their dark ship a dragon fit to carry such creatures.

  The voyage had been hard and weary, and this to be its ending! Unfair.

  Raven was so close now that Gervase could see the Danish leader’s face, aye, and his henchman’s, too. Gervase knew them at once. Not a seaman on these coasts but had heard of the ruddy giant with his ax and burning beard, and the dark-visaged sworder in black mail.

  The heart of Gervase turned cold. Yet at the same time he felt hope stirring, for it was said that these twain were not given to wanton slaying of the helpless. And helpless he was, and all his crew.

  Captain Gervase licked his lips and shouted through cupped hands, “Quarter!”

  Wulfhere loosed a roar of laughter. “O-ho-ho-ho-ho! Quarter ye’re asking? Oh, little man, little man! You cheat us of a good fight!”

  “Not such a good fight as that,” Gervase called wryly back, considering the aspect of his men. “But such as we can put up, unless you promise us our lives, we will give you. And more than that!” he added in sudden inspiration. “We’ve casks and casks of good wine below. Do you board us bent on slaughter, I’ll take two men and smash them open myself!”

  The Skull-splitter ceased to laugh. “Ye be a monster!” he bellowed. “A black-hearted monster!”

  Cormac mac Art laughed. It was untrue that he never did so, and he did like grit.

  “Let him have his way, Wulfhere,” he advised. “I’ve a notion how this can be turned to our account. Let me be having his ear.”

  “I had rather let you have his whole head,” Wulfhere grumbled.

  “Ahoy, trader! Do but these things and we grant ye life. Be ye running your tub ashore, and that swiftly, then set your crew to loading your cargo aboard us. Swiftly, ye hear? Swifter than the like was ever done aforetime! And remember the price, do ye fail!”

  Gervase looked once at the dark, scarred face, and turned to scan again his disheartened crew. None but a madman on the breast of the sea would have opted for resistance.

  “Done!” he said.

  And done it was. A spear’s cast from the nearby white beach, Thetis let down both iron anchors and Raven grappled to her. Cormac was first on her deck, with four men eager at his back, among them Knud the Swift and one warrior with hair black as the Gael’s own, a rare sight among northerners.

  “The lighter stuff first, and most costly,” said Cormac. “It’s silk ye have aboard, and rare gems and spices. There is ivory too, balsams and jewellery that’s after being looted from Egypt’s king-graves. It’s unwise ye’d be for attempting to d
eny it. Show me.”

  Betrayed! Gervase thought bitterly. But who could have done it in such detail? None surely, but the factor who directed the lading. And Gervase promised himself that he’d see the man torn by bears-if he survived this day.

  For the pirate’s list was true to the item. The bolts of cloth the sailors threw down to Wulfhere were not all of silk; some were Egyptian cotton loomed so fine and shining that the difference was not evident at a glance, and nigh as rare as silk, here in the west. They were stowed in the bow, with the boxes and packets that came also from Alexandria, the incense and pepper and the all but priceless sugar.

  And Wulfhere, thirsty Wulfhere, had scarcely a glance for any of it.

  “The wine!” he demanded.

  The wine was brought forth. Sailors levered oaken casks from their cradles in the hold, and trundled them to the hatchway. Ropes were knotted about them with a fearful care to make them secure, and brawny men drew them on deck, flashing uneasy sidewise stares the while. The casks were lowered over Thetis’s side and received with joy by the wild crew of Raven. Swiftly those men lashed their prizes firmly to bench-ends with a proper eye to balance and distribution so that Raven should continue to ride the sea well.

  All was accomplished with a will and speed that no stevedore on Burdigala’s docks had ever approached.

  Since Raven was both a leaner vessel than Thetis, and shallower of draught, she could not take the entire load. Still, by canny stowing the Danes made a fair shift towards it.

  No more than an hour later, the Danish galley carried twenty-three casks of red Falernian; three were lashed crosswise in a row in the stern with ten more on their sides along each row of oar benches, so positioned as not to impede the oarsmen-and them sitting appreciably closer to the sea than they had been.